Alston Grove

My buzzword sensor has found enough occurrences of people using the term “tagging” to investigate further. Tagging is just classifying things, but in the way that most people see the world instead of how scientific taxonomies distinguish it. When you get a highly collaborative, self-organizing community like the Web to start tagging, then you have something interesting called a folksonomy. And it’s the latest rage for social network websites.

For example, del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager where you store and categorize your collection of links. Because links are tagged, you can find links that other people tagged with categories that interest you. Of course, bloggers have been using tags all along, tagging their posts, photos, and links automatically, because most blog software uses RSS/Atom. To manually tag things like links, people are using a new attribute of rel=”tag”.

The current fad is to measure the use of tags and display a weighted list, also called a tag cloud. It’s a list of popular tags, with the most popular tags receiving a larger font size and weight. Some examples of tag clouds are at Technorati, Flickr, Craigslist, and 43 Things. Perhaps we have gotten a small step closer to the semantic web.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.